The child labor reduction and the school attendance increase in the 90´s in Brazil / A redução do trabalho infantil e o aumento da freqüência escolar na década de 90 no Brasil

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2007

RESUMO

During the 1990s, child employment declined and school attendance increased sharply in Brazil. The aim of this study is to investigate the causes of this phenomenon, more specifically, to test the relative importance of three hypotheses: changes in the family background, in particular, the generalized raise in parents schooling; the deterioration of child labor market and changes in educational variables. The analysis exploits Brazils Monthly Employment Survey (PME) from IBGE (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística). The PME has a longitudinal design that allows us to observe the same family during two consecutive years. To model the problem of time allocation decisions between school, work (or both) and leisure (none), we used the Multinomial Logit Model. Through an extension of Oaxaca-Blinder technique, we verified that the changes in the probability of a child to work or to attend school are more associated to changes in the explanatory variables (observable characteristics) than to changes in the estimated coefficients (non-observable characteristics). Besides, the phenomenon seems to be more associated to changes in educational variables, such as the raise of the average schooling of public school teachers, and changes in the family background. In addition, the change in the distribution of childrens time allocation in the 1st interview (first year) seems to be even more important to explain the decline in child labor and the increase in school attendance in Brazil. As we are controlling throughout the fact that the child failed or was approved in advancing school and for age-grade distortion, we argue that this result could be associated to educational policies that try combating school drop-out (assuming that the decline in the repetition rates resulted form that kind of policies).

ASSUNTO(S)

decomposition methods freqüência escolar - brasil métodos de decomposição child labor trabalho de menor school attendance - brazil

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